Rabu, 21 Desember 2011

Understanding the new media (Part 1 of 2)

Understanding the new media (Part 1 of 2)
Alwi Dahlan, PROFESSOR EMERITUS IN COMMUNICATIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF INDONESIA;  INFORMATION MINISTER IN 1998
Sumber : JAKARTA POST, 21 Desember 2011


Understanding the new media is not as straightforward as it may seem. New media is a new, very broad term, used differently by many, encompassing a variety of meanings, concepts, technologies and functions.

In general, all new media have certain similar characteristics, which relate to changes in media production, distribution and use. The characteristics are: digital, interactive, hypertextual, virtual, networked and simulated. Without going into technical elaboration, these characteristics make it possible for new media to present various content forms, such as text, picture, video and sound, all together as part of the same media, by virtue of digital technology.

It also transforms the new media audience into an independent, autonomous user, who is free to choose any specific content or topic, in any form of presentation, from any new media site on the Internet, or on a combination of those, at the user’s convenience – due to the interactive, hypertextual and networked characteristics of the new media. With the transformation of the new media, the claims on media power, as argued in the theories on gate-keeping, agenda-setting hypothesis, and the framing effect, would become outdated.

The role of the new media in the Arab Spring’s political upheavals certainly should be examined in a wider communications context rather than mass communications. The intended impact is not limited to a mass media audience, or the users of particular new media, but the much wider scope of public, beyond a specific media, even broader.

Works on the social media in Western countries have shown the extensive networks of such new media, which still keeps growing fast. A comprehensive book now in use among business and network practitioners (Safko, 2010) lists 15 social media categories which are still expanding at present time. They are: social networking, publishing, photo sharing, audio, video, microblogging, livecasting, virtual worlds, gaming, productivity applications, aggregators, RSS, search engines, mobile, and interpersonal social media.

Social communications networks may have more potential in our country, where mass media has a limited reach to the general population due to low reading habits or low economic positions, with some being able to afford to pay subscriptions. Yet, in traditional societies, social networks are much stronger. With the increase of Internet users, particularly the rise of cell phone users, the reach of social media would have the most potential, as a study on the links between traditional community networks and cell phone networks has shown (Irwansyah, 2010).

At this point a question arises whether social media also played a role in the Arab Spring or any other upheavals around the world. Which of the various new media are the most relevant and have the most potential for the future needs of Muslim countries?

The Middle Eastern experience inspires others in relation to the potential of the new media for the civil society movement in the rest of the world, including in Western countries, where the new social media originated.

The idea that social media could mobilize the masses was proved successful in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and was adopted as the “Arab Spring Model” by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement when they seized New York’s Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street financial district.

By the use of the Cairo model, this informal, non-institutional, rather unorganized protest movement was able to develop into a strong resistance movement on a broader scale through social networking links in various cities. Starting with a single Twitter hash tag, it was able to mobilize thousands of people in various cities within the US (e.g. Boston, Washington, Oakland) as well as outside (Rome, London) to join this decentralized and leaderless movement pressing for a fundamental and structural change to the current unjust economic system as symbolized by Wall Street.

So far, the model has not achieved quick success when applied outside of its original environment, the Middle East. The OWS action at Zuccotti Park has been disbanded by the New York authorities. Nevertheless, the movement initiators are still convinced that it will expand virally to networks of other groups with similar characteristics, and finally would become one real worldwide movement. On Facebook, for example, Occupy Europe had more than 369,000 signatures on a petition against corporate sponsors of the G-20 November summit in Paris.

Many are skeptical over the future of the Occupy movements. Yet, the Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, considers the whole series of protest actions, which began with the 1999 anti-globalization protest in Seattle and started anew with the Arab Spring movements in Tunisia in January 2011, as “one global social protest movement”, regardless of each movement’s stated agenda.

Modern technology enables all “social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can”. Hence, whatever the name of the movement in wherever place it is located, all of the protests are essentially one, to fight rising inequality around the world. Global social protests, through the new media, are the future trend that will correct the rise in global inequality.

There are also doubts that social media are genuinely effective in achieving success. Definitive research is lacking, but some studies show that the role of new media has been limited and in many cases failed to achieve stated goals. Earlier “revolutions” (e.g. in Moldova) were cracked down upon immediately by the regime, since the government had been following the revolution’s new media platform continuously from the beginning. The significance of new media is also exaggerated far beyond actual development in some cases. The so-called 2009 Iranian Twitter revolution was later criticized as mostly an American made “revolution”, involving tweets among people in New York cafes “that give them the thrilled feeling of partaking in a revolution”, which later was overblown by their media.

The failure of the movement to make sure that its goals were implemented consistently may also show the weaknesses of the new media as an effective instrument. While it is true, for example, that new media was successful in rallying the Egyptian population to unseat president Hosni Mubarak, the continuing success of the revolution became doubtful when it lost touch with political maneuverings, and the second round of the Tahrir Square action had to be urgently organize in response.

Similarly, the real contribution of the new media in cases such as Libya easily became questionable when real actions in the field were detached from new media and turned to be more militaristic in nature, involving outside forces. Such interventions by foreign powers in an insurgency may be a widely accepted practice, although not discussed in communication literature.
 

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